In this plague year, when it would be too hot to move even if there were places open to move to, Democratic political sage and campaign guru Jennifer Palmieri has handed us a nice glass of whine to sip slowly in the shade in the form of her new book, She Proclaims.
At the risk of repeating what everyone is hearing nonstop nowadays, she argues that white men are oppressing nonwhites and women, rigging the world to be run their way.
Perhaps that’s why the two white men whose presidential campaigns she worked for, John Kerry and John Edwards, went nowhere fast, while Barack Obama, for whom she worked in the White House but did not campaign, served two terms as president, and her old boss, Hillary Clinton, at least won the national popular vote. In the Republican primaries, the combined vote for Hispanics Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio exceeded the votes cast for Donald Trump, the ultimate winner.
Biden, the basement-confined nominee of the Democrats, has vowed to select a woman as his running mate, and most of those women who are mentioned aren’t white. This means that if he wins, a prospect more likely with each new tweet and comment from President Trump, the nominee of the Democrats in 2024 will be nonwhite and a woman. And that means that if Nikki Haley is still in the running on the Republican side, a president who is both nonwhite and female may be more or less guaranteed.
Moreover, three of the best-known and most significant Republican senators today are Cruz, Tim Scott, and Rubio. If you agree with Palmieri that “white men” still run things, you have to admit that they’re doing it rather badly and soon may not run anything at all.
If Palmieri is using herself as an example of women who have been “undervalued,” it seems that she’s made a poor choice. Her first national candidates both fared poorly — Kerry losing to President George W. Bush in the 2004 election and Edwards bowing out in 2008 owing to love-child problems. This may suggest she is both a poor politician and also a bad judge of men.
Palmieri did work as an economic adviser for Obama, a great politician, but only after he had been safely elected through the efforts of his own set of campaigners. As for her work as public relations director in the train wreck that was “Hillary!,” the results speak for themselves.
Another person speaking is Donna Brazile, a legend in politics since the late 1980s, who had the thankless job of Democratic national chairwoman in that election. She recalls one encounter in her campaign memoir, Hacks, in which Palmieri “glowered, jumped up, and walked out, slamming the door shut behind. I was thinking, ‘If that bitch ever does anything like that to me again, I’m gonna walk.’”
So much for rapport with “women of color.” And so much for Palmieri’s delusions of competence.
“It is marginalized populations divided against each other that prop up the old patriarchy,” as Palmieri informs us. And it is people like her that prop up and comprise the legion of self-righteous, self-pitying, self-described victims.
